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Yep. Toffee apples. Remember toffee apples? When I was a little kid, toffee apples seemed to be everywhere. But I just realised that I never even see a toffee apple anywhere anymore. And haven't for donkey's years.

So, question one... Why? What made the world suddenly go off toffee apples? I can't figure it out. Can you?

And (an easier question) here's question number two...How many other 'treats' of your childhood have also disappeared without trace? And why do you reckon they have disappeared?

I can start the list of disappeared treats rolling with...Tiger Nuts - Gawd, tiger nuts. They probably disappeared because they tasted like chewing builder's gravel. Bleuuurch! No great loss to the world.

I think that the 'toffee' part was largely replaced by chocolate by retailers - probably because you'll remember the sticky state we used to get into when you tried to eat a toffee apple! We bought some for the kids in October from the supermarket (they went in the bin in mid-November, when they still hadn't been eaten!).

What were Tiger Nuts? I remember squirrel nuts - which were an incredibly hard bit of toffee coated in chocolate, and our local retro sweet shop still sells those.

I miss Striper bars - you always used to get them free sellotaped to the front cover of Look In magazine.

What were Tiger Nuts? Duff, Tiger nuts were dead cheap, shaped like musket balls and just as tough to eat. They came in a bag or loose and were diabolical tooth-breakers. They took ages to chew and tasted of nothing except like having a gobful of dried Polyfilla pellets several decades past their sell by date.

The really 'fun' part of Tiger Nuts is that they had really knife-sharp edges that wreaked destruction on (ahem) oneís sensitive lower sphincter as they passed totally undigested through oneís digestive system. Pooing reached new heights of excruciating eye-watering pain.

Despite all that, we were tough little kids in the 1950's so we kept on coughing up our hard earned pocket money and buying a penn'orth of Tiger Nuts and eating them by the handful (probably only because everything else tastier and kinder on the bum was on ration or hadnít even been invented then).

They looked like this life-size picture shown down below.

Although we were blissfully ignorant of it at the time, Wiki tells me that Tiger Nuts were little tubers of the Cyperus esculentus plant which is a member of the sedge family that's widespread across much of the world. It is found in most of the Eastern Hemisphere, including Southern Europe, Africa and Madagascar, as well as the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

Now the good news! Remarkably, these days Tiger Nuts have been rediscovered and labelled as a superfood! Apparently (despite their bum demolitioning properties) they are supposed to be actually good for you, as this website attests...

You can, if you are feeling really suicidal or having a Vegan moment, even buy them for 13 quid a kilo from Amazon! A kilo will take the average family of four a lifetime to masticate, probably longer. You have been warned!